Grant wondered what the creature lived on. ‘Pomes’ did not provide a living. Nor did free-lance journalism; or, rather, the kind of journalism that Archie was likely to write. Perhaps he scraped a living from ‘criticism’. It was from the ranks of the ineffective that the minor critics were recruited. There was always the chance, of course, that he was subsidised; if not by some native malcontent with a thirst for power, then by some foreign agency with an interest in trouble-making. He was of a type very familiar to the Special Branch: the failure, sick of a curdled vanity.

Grant, still hankering after that midday newspaper that Johnny or Kenny was due to deliver at Clune, had had thoughts of suggesting to Pat that they call it a day, and give up enticing fish that had no intention of biting. But if they went now they would have to walk back in Wee Archie’s company, and that was something to be avoided. So he prepared to resume his idle flicking of the loch water.

But Archie, it seemed, was anxious to make one of the fishing party. If there was room in the boat for a third passenger, he said, he would be glad to accompany them.

Again speech trembled on Pat’s lips.

‘Yes,’ said Grant, ‘do come. You can help to bale.’

‘Bale?’ said the saviour of Scotland, blenching.

‘Yes. Her seams are not too good. She makes a lot of water.’

On second thoughts Archie decided that perhaps after all it was time that he was wending his way (Archie never went anywhere, he always wended his way) towards Moymore. The post would be in, and there would be his mail to deal with. And then, lest it might cross their minds that he was unused to boats, he told them how good he was in a boat. It was thanks only to his skill in a boat that he and four others had reached a Hebridean beach alive last summer. He told the tale with a growing verve that gave rise to a base suspicion that he was making it up as he went along, and having finished he switched hastily from the subject, as if afraid of questions, and asked if Grant knew the islands.

Grant, locking up the bothy and pocketing the key, said that he did not. Whereupon Archie made him free of them with a proprietor’s generosity. The herring fleets of Lewis, the cliffs of Mingulay, the songs of Barra, the hills of Harris, the wild flowers of Benbecula, and the sands, the endless wonderful white sand, of Berneray.

‘The sands don’t sing, I suppose,’ Grant said, putting bounds to the boasting. He stepped into the boat, and pushed off.

‘No,’ said Wee Archie, ‘no. They’re in Cladda.’

‘What are?’ asked Grant, startled.

‘The singing sands. Well, good fishing to you, but it’s not a day for fishing, you know. Much too bright.’

And with this kindly pat on the head he re-erected his shepherd’s crook, and swung away along the shore towards Moymore and his letters. Grant stood motionless in the boat, watching him go. When he was nearly beyond earshot he called to him suddenly:

‘Are there any walking stones on Cladda?’

‘What?’ said Archie’s inadequate pipe.

‘Are there any walking stones on Cladda?’

‘No. They’re in Lewis.’

And the dragonfly creature with its mosquito voice went away into the brown distance.

3

They came home at tea-time with five unimpressive-looking trout and large appetites. Pat, excusing the thin trout, pointed out that on such a day you couldn’t expect to catch any but what he called ‘the sillies’; the respect-worthy fish had more sense than to be caught in such weather. They came down the last half-mile to Clune like homing horses, Pat skipping from turf to turf like a young goat and as voluble as he had been silent on the way out. The world and London river seemed the width of stellar space away, and Grant would not have called the King his cousin.

But as they scraped their shoes at the flagged doorway of Clune, he became aware of his unreasonable impatience to see that newspaper. And since he resented unreason in anyone and abominated it in himself he carefully scraped his shoes all over a second time.

‘Man, you’re awfully particular,’ said Pat, giving his footgear a rudimentary wipe on the twin scraper.

‘It’s a boorish thing to go into a house with mud on one’s shoes.’

‘Boorish?’ asked Pat, who, as Grant suspected, held it a ‘jessie-like’ thing to be clean.

‘Yes. Slovenly and un-grown-up.’

‘Huh,’ said Pat; and surreptitiously scraped his shoes again. ‘It’s a poor house that can’t stand a few dollops of mud,’ he said, reasserting his independence, and went storming into the sitting-room like an invading army.

In the sitting-room Tommy was dripping honey on to a hot scone, Laura was pouring tea, Bridget was arranging a new set of objects in a design on the floor, and the terrier was on the make round the table. Except that sunlight had been added to firelight it was the same picture as last night. With one difference. Somewhere in the room there was a daily paper that mattered.

Laura, seeing his searching eye, asked him if he was looking for something.

‘Yes, the daily paper.’

‘Oh, Bella has it.’ Bella was the cook. ‘I’ll get it from her after tea if you want to see it.’

He had a moment of stinging impatience with her. She was far too complacent. She was far too happy, here in her fastness, with her laden tea-table, and her little roll of fat above the belt, and her healthy children, and her nice Tommy, and her security. It would do her good to have some demons to fight; to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then. But his own absurdity rescued him, and he knew that it was not so. There was no complacence in Laura’s happiness, nor was Clune any refuge from the realities. The two young sheep-dogs who had welcomed them at the road gate in a swirl of black-and-white bodies and lashing tails would once upon a time have been called Moss, or Glen, or Trim or something like that. Today, he had noticed, they answered to Tong and Zang. The waters of the Chindwin had long ago flowed into the Turlie. There were no Ivory Towers any more.

‘There is The Times, of course,’ Laura said, ‘but it is always yesterday’s, so you will have seen it.’

‘Who is Wee Archie?’ he asked, sitting down at the table.

‘So you’ve met Archie Brown, have you?’ Tommy said, clapping the top half on his hot scone, and licking the honey that oozed from it.

‘Is that his name?’

‘It used to be. Since he elected himself the champion of Gaeldom he calls himself Gilleasbuig Mac-a’-Bruithainn. He’s frightfully unpopular at hotels.’

‘Why?’

‘How would you like to page someone called Gilleasbuig Mac-a’-Bruithainn?’

‘I wouldn’t like to have him under my roof at all. What is he doing here?’

‘He’s writing an epic poem in Gaelic, so he says. He didn’t know any Gaelic until about two years ago, so I don’t think the poem can be up to much. He used to belong to the cleesh-clavers-clatter school. You know: the Lowland-Scots boys. He was one of them for years. But he didn’t get anywhere very much. The competition was too keen. So he decided that Lowland Scots was just debased English and very reprehensible, and that there was nothing like a return to the “old tongue”, to a real language. So he “sat under” a bank clerk in Glasgow, a chap from Uist, and swotted up some Gaelic. He comes to the back door and talks to Bella now and then, but she says she doesn’t understand a word. She thinks he’s “not right in the head”.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with Archie Brown’s head,’ Laura said tartly. ‘If he hadn’t had the wit to think up this rôle for himself he would be teaching school in some god-forsaken backwater and even the school inspector wouldn’t have known his name.’

‘He’s very conspicuous on a moor, anyhow,’ Grant said.